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Manji. 18 February 2017. 2:30 pm.

=adaptation of the novel Quicksand, by Junichirō Tanizaki, serialised in 1928-30=

Japanese with English subtitles

cast Ayako Wakao, Kyoko Kishida

“Why have
you kept such a beautiful body hidden!” I asked reproachfully. “It’s too much!
It’s just too much!”

Junichirō Tanizaki, Quicksand (1930)

The
pioneering lesbian novel Quicksand was
published in Japan in serialised form in 1928-30, but it has some of the feel
of a 1970s Latin-American soap opera. The key note is Hysteria, the refrain is
Deception. In the novel, everyone is
deciving everyone else, in increasingly unlikely plot turns, as the characters
get deeper and deeper into the quicksand of infatuation. The shadow of Dorian
Gray looms large in this season of the Film Qlub, and we find it here too… The
beautiful and psychotically-manipulative young Mitsuko pulls easy targets
towards her, and as the weight increases, so do the chances that they’ll all
sink together.

The
novel seems partly inspired by another Irish classic, Le Fanu’s vampire-tale Carmilla, with a narrator whose
intentions remain obscure. In Quicksand, the story is told by the
cheerful widow Sonoko directly to the author, Tanizaki himself, in a recorded
conversation. This is an old literary device, which Tanizaki exploits really
well, giving minute physical descriptions of letters, contracts, evidence he
has gathered. This kind of detail would not make sense in a film,
and plays no part in the 1966 adaptation (they’ve been five adaptations to
date). The film simply presents lesbian love as a kind of paroxysm, as a series
of incontrolable and violent seizures. The book is a meditation on the power of
lies, proposing that love is madness and life is fiction. The adaptation is a
David-Lynch-esque queer spectacle, a film made to astonish. Surrender to it.